Remote controlled glass block LED matrix

At Hive13, a Cincinnati-based hackerspace, they like to hack everything – even their bathroom. One of the bathroom’s walls faces the street, and is made up of thick glass privacy blocks. A few years ago, they thought it would be a cool idea to install an LED matrix to the back side of the glass wall to spruce things up a bit. After a couple of iterations, they finally had something they were happy to show off, but they wanted to make it even cooler.

While the the Arduino and ShiftBrite shield running the matrix could be controlled over a serial connection, they wanted to use the ProjectBlinkenlights tools to control things over the network. While that didn’t quite work out as planned, it wasn’t necessarily an exercise in futility. While Blinkenlights controls were out of the question, they were inspired to add OSC compatibility to the Processing sketch, which allows them to work the display with an app available for both Android and iOS devices.

The result is pretty slick, as you can see in the video below. Now all they need to do is get Tetris up and running!

I think he’s saying the distance between the bottom glass block and the top of the door is short, like if it is a 2 story building, they must have used 2×4 joists.
Or either the glass blocks are just above the door in a high ceiling room.

I was going to suggest a “Number 1 or Number 2? Now you can announce it to the world!” function…. I see that someone else has already suggested it and I’m glad to see I’m not the only one demented enough to think of such a thing…

A business around the corner from me has a larger version of this at the front of their store. Every time I drive past it’s different to the day before. Sometimes a horizontal bar graph or just geometric patterns. Each block seems to allow any colour. No idea what’s driving it.

I think Sandy (http://twitter.com/#!/codersandy) did something similar after seeing this project in an earlier stage. Can’t recall if he drilled the bricks himself or found something closer to premade.